Apple is the Leader in Admitting Software Bugs

Apple is the new leader in reports of software holes and insecurities, according to security company Secunia.

To be fair, the Secunia's method tracks the number of publically reported security flaws, leaving Apple's taking the number one spot to be interpreted in different ways.

For one, Apple's reported flaws could mean that the company is more vigilant than others in reporting and fixing bugs in its software. Of course, the flipside to that is that Apple's software has to have those flaws in the first place, otherwise there'd be nothing to report on. Apple's security flaws don't come primarily from its OS X operating system, but rather mostly stem from software like Safari, QuickTime and iTunes.

Apple took the bug list lead over from Oracle, which held the crown for most reports from 2006 to 2009. Microsoft maintained its ranking at third, as it has over the past three years.

Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.

Marcus, how can you purport the idea that the MOST vulnerabilities is a good idea when every other year people slam Microsoft for having so many flaws (read; failures).

Admitting flaws is all well and good, but how soon are they fixed? How are they fixed? How often do the fixes fail? How severe are they?

This is pure bias and spin. Having the most flaws is bad. You have absolutely no statistics on what % of the flaws are reported from each company, so a NORMAL human would assume it was equal proportions. Then looking at it from a 'how large is the software codebase' perspective, realising Windows probably has the largest amount of code, you'd realise under these assumptions Microsoft has less bugs per line than Apple.

And, in fact, it wasn't long ago (a year?) since I read that Microsoft actually has some of the lowest bug-per-line in the entire software industry, and that the sheer size of Windows is the reason we feel it's so buggy.

I kinda like the way MS is sending updates without bothering me too much about what they do,on the other hand it is important to know when they find a serious flaw in windows or office so we can protect ourselves until they fix it.

To touch on a point Clintonio made, Microsoft doesn't just make Windows. If you've ever had a full MSDN subscription you'd realise just how MUCH software Microsoft has out there. Aside from Windows and Office, there's BizTalk, MOM, SMS, Exchange, ISA server, Visual Studio, the list goes on and on and on.

Compared to Microsoft, Apple's software product lineup (and hence codebase) is a drop in the ocean.

As Clintonio said, you'd need to factor in the number of lines of code (or a similar measure) for the graph to give ANY meaningful comparison.